Saturday, 8 March 2008

The following is for y'all to get a couple of your smaller teeth sunk into:

Disaster has struck the village of Pooka Delaval – somebody stole the vicar’s hat!!! Jack and Paul must call on Cousin Mithras and his mysterious companion, Mr Gander, to aid them in their time of crisis. But can they find the hat before it’s too late…?

And who or what is this Bendy Satan, heard whispered, rumoured by the wind?

With a riveting score by acclaimed beat combo St. Cuthbert’s Burials, this classic fable is every bit the equal of The Seventh Seal.

Friday, 7 March 2008

In a first for this here Gander, I shall post what, by means of its lines not reaching the edge of the page, must surely be a poem. It was written some two years ago; it's almost ready to walk. But not quite.

Fredrik Fernandez sneered into his black coffee. The whole proposition was ridiculous. Yet he was obliged by bonds of friendship and honour. He had no option other than the one which, given other less strenuous circumstances, he would have avoided with great care. However his other options would signal an end to any sort of companionship between himself and Madison. Of course, the friendship would continue, but it would never be the same. There would always be an unbreachable distance between them, and since this was the one friendship of his existence, he didn’t want to screw it up. He didn’t want to go to the trouble of finding another like minded individual, establishing a dialogue and befriending them. His social skills weren’t up to this, not since last summer.

So shackled by friendship Fredrick waited, with his coffee and buttered toast, for Madison to arrive. He did so promptly at seven o’th’morning clock, trailing Mia and a trunk. This did not brighten Fredrick’s mood, he did not appreciate the early morning, nor did he appreciate the unexpected inclusion of Mia. She did not fit into the plan, and Fredrick was a man who liked to stick to the plans, no matter how foolish those plans were. Mia’s relationship to the plan was comparable to taking a square peg and attempting to ram it into your ear. Upon arriving Madison helped himself to Fredrick’s sparse kitchen, emptying the contents of his liquor cabinet into a bowl of cereal.

And thus it came to be that the overly drunk Madison, the reluctant Fernandez and the ill fitting Mia, situated around the trunk, contemplated the task in hand.

Fredrick first met Mia at her wedding to Madison. It was a small service, complete with vicar and church, attended by only the closest of relations. This extended to Fredrick and Heinrick, Madison’s dog. At the time Mia was fifteen and had been plucked by Madison from her previous life of suburban monotony. Fredrick took an instant disliking, as did Heinrick, both subsequentially urinated on Mia, Heinrick on the Honeymoon and Fredrick when she had been stung by a jellyfish.

Mia was now sixteen and had adopted a disconcerting fascination with her own death, disconcerting to Fredrick; Madison seemed more interested in his own pleasures. Her frequent proclamations of imminent doom appeared to have no effect on Madison, Fredrick believed that he didn’t care about her at all, she was merely another symptom of the persona Madison project, one of thorough disreputability.

She was a stubby, rotund blond girl, she would never be called a woman, completely unsuited to the name Mia. Her parents had had illusions of an idyllic family with engaging children and had decided upon exotic names for them. Mia was the eldest and her brother, Philippe, was the youngest of the two children. Fredrick could only theorise that her marriage to Madison was some sort of attempt on her part to compensate for her complete lack of character.

Sunday, 2 March 2008

Not even the strongest generic pharmaceutical gap-filling cement could have kept his torso from the armpits up from remaining detached after thirty-five hours in surgery; that lump of metal, the incidental shell, hurled at forty-five degrees away from where the party was really at, had a party of its own. Sparing him the usual indignity, Jim’s bowels emptied up through a gap near where his left lung, gripped plaintive and instantaneously by the shoulders and head, might otherwise have been, had fate had it differently. Fate’s a funny thing; were Dr Rudolph not in that particular village at that particular time, surgery would most likely never have been considered an option. Circumstance (secular fate), however, had it that Dr Rudolph was in the boudoir of some local yokel whose wife was in the throes of “stress-induced anal distension”, as diagnosed. Trepanning and Hippocratic semen were intrinsic to the cure (notes on that case are smudged at best and cogent at worst; besides, that’s a tangent, and reports such as this will be tainted with nothing of the sort).

Jim was in a horrendous state when the nearest Fraulein reached his sodden dying patch of ground; it couldn’t have come as much of a surprise to those present at any point in the affair had they been told that fragments of bone and other bodily shrapnel had been flung as far even as the battlefield. Nobody was in any position, however, to tell them anything of the sort, or otherwise.

Pooka Business

Our principal goal is to be all things to all men. Words. Spittle. Joy above all things. Look, and touch sometimes, all with clean fingers please. Veet for the tongue. Press studs for the abdomen. Gravy for the choir. Banjos for the genitals. Pooka Delaval.

Visions of Delaval(see Pookafield below) is the pictorial side of things. Good stuff.

Hotboxx is a radio show that streams from the heart of the pookasphere, bringing japes aplenty, and fine tunes to boot.

Counter Hive (see Pookafield again) charts the endless undulations over the years of the campaign against the insidious Human Advance (H.A.).